Lots of good insights here!

Some of them hit home for me:

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> It sounds like the product is "simple" but the reason for the large amount of code might be that there is no clear definition of the minimal viable product. The added complexity is possibly there because the UI/product team is piping in more requirements somehow.

That makes a lot of sense.

Pretty much all our app screens are extremely complex looking and full of different details. Actually, let me rephrase that: the whole system is completely inconsistent visually and each different screen has its own special widgets.

Interactions are not standardized and even tables have 20 different styles of text fields, which confuses our customers to hell, to my own chagrin.

All our screens are prototyped in Adobe XD before engineering looks at them, and that might be the root cause for (at least) the hardships at coding the frontend.

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> I've seen incredibly smart engineers stifle and essentially belittle other intermediate/junior engineers over their work or ideas

You're right.

I've seen senior engineers talking down junior engineers. This is something that shouldn't happen.

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> Giving engineers the room to develop design skills and make mistakes is important

> Systems can get complex and fail for a wide variety of reasons. Personally if I were the engineering manager and an engineer brought down the system somehow I would raise that as a cause of celebration without the connotation of death ("post-mortem"). Celebration since this is one step further in figuring out how to make the system more robust. A lot of time cultures promote an environment of fear where people are afraid of changing the code because things break. Continuously improve things so that it is harder and harder to break.

This is interesting.

Another poster mentioned we're trying to cater to "all kinds of developers". Maybe we should choose a specific profile?

The people I mentioned who complain that "things are going too fast" are also very averse to production mistakes and complain about it a lot.